CAC opens season with street artist 'JR'

Jun. 24, 2013

In Havana, Cuba. Anonymous French street photographer 'JR' 'pastes' huge portraits around the world. His first U.S. museum solo show opens the 2013-14 Contemporary Arts Center season in September. / Provided

Written by

Jackie Demaline

A building in Shanghai, part of the 'Wrinkles in the City' series. Anonymous French street photographer 'JR' 'pastes' huge portraits around the world. His first U.S. museum solo show opens the 2013-14 Contemporary Arts Center season in September. / Provided

A water tower in Shanghai. Anonymous French street photographer 'JR' 'pastes' huge portraits around the world. His first U.S. museum solo show opens the 2013-14 Contemporary Arts Center season in September. / Provided

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Contemporary Arts Center introduced anonymous French street photographer “JR” to Cincinnati in 2011, with his Inside Out Project that took a large-scale, participatory art project to communities across the region.

The center begins its 2013-14 season Sept. 20 with JR, bringing his street art inside for his first museum exhibit in the United States. The show is co-organized with Dallas Contemporary.

JR, is, after all, known internationally for capturing people’s attention outside museum walls, creating installations from thousands of poster-sized portraits and plastering them in public places – on rooftops, on broken bridges in Africa, shanty towns in Brazil, 100 feet high on the side of the Tate Modern in London.

He first pasted photographs in suburban train stations of Paris in 2001. Ten years later he was awarded the 2011 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Prize, awarded annually to an individual to help them spark global change.

Details are still being worked out but Platow promises the exhibit will be “more than paintings, videos, photography.” JR will remain anonymous but Platow said the solo show will tell visitors “who he is.”

JR will create a new work in the lobby of the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, made up of photos of people attending the members’ preview of the exhibit.

Work from his ongoing global series “Portrait of a Generation,” “Face 2 Face,” “Women are Heroes” and “Wrinkles of the City” as well as “Inside Out” will be featured.

The exhibit will be outside as well as inside. Platow is hoping an archival image of the center’s three founders (Peggy Frank Crawford, Betty Pollack Rauh and Rita Rentschler Cushman) will have pride of place on the building façade.

The Inside Out truck that was parked in Times Square this spring for a New York City show will come to Cincinnati during the exhibit’s run.

Public programs will include a screening of the HBO documentary “Inside Out: The People’s Art Project.” Find information including an interview and resources at www.hbo.com.

• Architect Zaha Hadid will visit Cincinnati this fall to mark the 10th anniversary of the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art. A date is still to be announced.

The center will also host a free, daylong Future Cities architecture symposium with University of Cincinnati’s DAAP on Nov. 9.

• For the center’s 75th anniversary in 2014, new curator Steven Matijcio plans a memory-inspired exhibition to open the 2014-15 season will begin this year.

• In 2015, the Contemporary Arts Center will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the exhibit and the notorious reaction that put it on the national map. In 1990, Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment led to an obscenity trial. The center plans an event themed on First Amendment issues in the arts today. ⬛

CAC PERFORMANCES:

A performance season will be announced in July by curator Drew Klein. For the first time, Contemporary Arts Center will offer a subscription package.

Already announced, “red, black & GREEN: a blues (rbGb)” is scheduled for May 2014, a hybrid performance work that “brings the stories and voices of Black America into the center of a timely conversation about race, class, culture and the environment.”

CAC is raising money for the performance and residency. Find out more at power2give.org.